The Way We Live Now: Page Turner; Maile Meloy, writer An Author With Authority

By Laura Miller

Published: May 11, 2003

To ignore a couple of time-honored writerly rules of thumb -- write what you know; show, don't tell -- takes nerve. To do so without showboating or proclaiming yourself a literary rebel takes self-possession. And to create vital, persuasive fiction while you're at it takes something else -- talent, obviously, and that rare quality readers long for and seldom find in an author: authority. Maile Meloy has it in spades. Somehow she pulls off what never quite seemed possible before: combining the meticulous realism of domestic fiction with the witchery of a natural-born storyteller.

In her first novel, ''Liars and Saints,'' which will be published June 17, Meloy follows four tangled generations of the Santerre family, French Canadian Catholics who settle in Southern California during World War II. That sounds like a saga, yet the book is only 260 pages long -- and yet again you don't feel you've missed a thing. The things you haven't missed include life on an aircraft carrier in the war's Pacific theater, dance lessons at a Catholic girls' school, illicit sex leading to an illegitimate pregnancy, the Beatles, smoking pot in Hawaii, the Kennedy assassination, miscarriage, light bondage, a couple of cross-country road trips, political campaigns, divorce, incest (sort of), another illegitimate pregnancy, cancer, same-sex romance, a toothless old man who claims he can control reality with his mind, improbable reunions, apostasy and murder.

Miraculously, this doesn't feel sketchy or rushed, and it doesn't boil over into soap opera. Instead, Meloy keeps the tone light and wry as she teases out the legacy of a tiny incident -- a piece of advice offered by a well-meaning but clueless priest -- that compounds over the years into a sizable quantity of lies and bad faith. How does she do it?

Not by tapping her own life or her family's. The shy, soft-spoken Meloy, 31, says that she grew up in Montana without any particular religious faith. A hard-bitten Western sensibility shows up in some of the short stories collected in ''Half in Love,'' published last year. But she can also conjure the voice of an urbane 60-ish Frenchman with uncanny ease. She even won the admiration of Philip Roth, who wrote a quote for the jacket of ''Liars and Saints.'' Meloy is among the impressive and versatile group of young writers who have emerged from the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine, a group that includes Michael Chabon, Alice Sebold, Glen David Gold, Aimee Bender and David Benioff. And while you might not expect a transplanted Montanan to produce such a spot-on depiction of Southern California suburban life, Meloy has done just that, with a sensitivity and brio that could inspire her neighbors to declare her an honorary native. Laura Miller